This has always always been the case. Grow up.
I’ve been fortunate enough to avoid the experience of layoffs, but learned the same lesson by pouring too much of myself into a role and burning out.
Until you’ve directly experienced the reasons work isn’t a family, etc. it can be hard to avoid falling into the trap of thinking that it is.
I would also say that most takes on this are a bit too binary, and some of my longest lasting and strongest friendships came from past jobs. I think the key to use work as an opportunity to establish those relationships instead of a ready-made support system, and not extending the personal aspect of those relationships into workplace behavior (e.g. doing more work because it’s “family”).
IMO its worth mentioning the reality of the employee<->corporation relationship because MANY companies in both tech and outside of tech have long tried to sell employees (particularly junior ones) on the idea that the company is a big family (without really acting like one beyond a very superficial level, eg. enjoy the free costco snacks, and or catered lunches/dinners when you're here for 12 hour days building value for the family!).
When you're a bit more experienced its easy to be more realistic about this relationship due to seeing that lie revealed a couple of times on a personal level, but that doesn't mean its not worth pointing out and talking about the lie.
I have worked at multiple companies than have disingenously referred to themselves as "family," always talking about "supporting your growth here," etc. It's just outright dishonest and for whatever reason it's the industry standard. Can't blame people for taking it at face value for a few years.
And honestly, one generation ago (and in certain fields like police), your work is a permanent group of supporters. It's not like such a thing is impossible.
On paper these are extremely well educated people from top institutions that boast about producing well rounded individuals.
What happened?
Not everyone is in a situation where the only option is to harden their shell and submit to a corporation. Some will find a family or great friends at work. It might mean limiting your career choices, but it is not a character flaw.
I burned out and crashed and burned, but it was more about me finding my self worth in work and the need to be superman and get that recognition and then later to keep funding a lifestyle that I again has substituted as my value and self worth.
Blue collar workers, union or no union, always understood this. It's white collar workers who feel blindsided because they believed the company propaganda. The propaganda is not itself a bad thing but workers need to understand the use of propaganda and why it's used.
If you've ever worked with blue collar workers you know they never believe in any of the sunshine management talk and instead deride it with contempt. White collar workers would be well advised to learn from their blue collar brethren.
There is a reason I get along better with blue collar folks than, especially the more inexperienced, white collar ones. Usually, blue collar folks have less problems following "orders" as well. This professional discipline makes a lot of things a lot easier.
This is ridiculous. I’m sure such sociopaths exist but there’s literally 30MM+ companies in the US. If only 1MM have an executive team this proposes there are millions of near murderers about. Pretty sure there’d be more murders.
It’s stupidly hyperbolic and actually implicitly assumes that which it purports to reject. Namely, it conflates job loss with death, giving companies more agency over your life than they actually have; the phrasing ignores its own first statement, in pursuit of clickbait nonsense.
Things change. Company growth isn't monotonically increasing. Not all positions will exist forever. Joining a company was never a guarantee that you'd have a paycheck and work to do until you decided to leave.
Also, pointing out that companies that did layoffs had worse performance than those that didn't have layoffs is an impressive example of missing the point. Layoffs usually are a result of declining performance, not the cause of it.
Layoffs are not always a result of declining performance. We have seen several now where quarterly results point to increased performance but layoffs still occur as an opportunity to dump workers without much criticism.
Exactly this, though I also propose as the end of your sentence, "...as CEOs and investors claim." We get told a lot of false or true-but-in-the-abstract motives.
The McSweeney's article[0] nails it perfectly for me. I am in the gap in the middle, where stable pensions were on the way out at the same time as companies dropped loyalty to employees into the bin. So I started my working life with the cultural expectation that existed--work for the same company, or maybe two companies, for 40ish years, then leave the workforce knowing I'd be stable--and am now expected to cover all of my years of life solely from the resources I can scrounge together. This, in a word, sucks, and it's part of why layoffs--especially when companies are still hiring in other areas is so jarring to me.
(Does it suck more than the generation or two who have come after me, who had neither the expectation of a pension or potential job stability? No! It's far worse for those later than me; their only "benefit" is people younger than me didn't start out with that false hope. They've always known they're screwed unless they can horde as much as possible in as little time as possible.)
0 - https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/macroeconomic-changes-ha...
If people could dependably and quickly find new employment after being laid off, with a 100% income replacement safety net for short-term frictional unemployment, getting laid off wouldn't be so stressful and thus wouldn't be as harmful to society.
To solution isn't to slow everything down (by making it more difficult to lay people off) but to speed everything up (reduce the personal consequences of getting laid off).
True, but Google search revenue was down 2% YoY. Youtube ad revenue was down 8% YoY. OpEx was up 10%. Google absolutely saw declining performance while on a hiring binge.
But you and I both know that will neve happen lol.
I worked at a company that tried to avoid mass layoffs at all costs. Whenever it became obvious that change was necessary, they'd do little cuts here and there, or they'd force people into roles they weren't familiar with (think front-end devs moved to cloud backend dev) to try to salvage people at all costs. They only cut people in small numbers here and there, and always spread out over long periods of time.
It was terrible. People were angry because they were hired for one job, but forced to do completely different work because the original needs had disappeared. People were constantly living in fear because there were micro-layoffs multiple times a month. They weren't called layoffs, though, so they weren't announced. You'd just open Slack to message someone and they'd be deactivated. You always wondered if you were next.
It's not pleasant to do mass layoffs, but if a company has to change it's much better to just rip the band-aid off and restructure all at once.
If your management hierarchy has too many mediocre managers, you lose the ability to evaluate who is/isn't pulling their weight at fine granularity, so you're stuck with blunt tools.
Much better than being fired for poor performance, too - "laid off because the company wasn't doing well" doesn't look that terrible on a resume.
I had to let someone go at a company we had just acquired in Montreal a few years ago. The guy was underperforming and had a huge attitude problem (bursts of anger actually). One of the frequent arguments he had with everyone was that he insisted he didn't need to learn French to live in Montreal and was somehow hostile to the language. I honestly questioned why he immigrated there in the first place.
Since this was an acquisition, it made it easy for us to do so. All we had to do was not to include him in the positions that would join the new company. Simple paperwork. He seemed to really want to come to the US but the performance and behavioral issues made it a big no. I don't think he would have passed the stricter requirements anyways.
Some companies like Google will even have engineers at certain acquired companies re-interview to transfer. The North acquisition was a poster-child for that: almost nobody got a job at Google, not even the founders. All they kept were the patents originally purchased from Intel.
Yah, only the older generation got a chance at that. I wish I could have one lifetime job like my older family members had, but like many things that basically can’t be done now.
1) The company is struggling, losing money, etc and needs to tackle corrective action before everyone loses their jobs. 2) The company is generating record revenues, profits are high, but growth will be 4% instead of 5% so we need layoffs.
There seem to be a staggering number of layoffs from camp two.
> But it's weird to see all of these think pieces implying that once someone is hired into a job, that job should exist forever.
It's also really weird to see:
- Rescinded offers - People hired and let go in 3 months (not for performance but because oopsie we miscalculated) - Entire teams built in the first half of a year let go in the second half - People with 10+ years of exemplary service dumped without even a phone call.
This is all also happening against the backdrop of low unemployment, high demand for tech labor, and a skills gap that's growing.
The analysis was of Fortune 1000 companies which typically aren't companies that would be suffering from long term declining performance which would imply the layoffs are a reaction to a short term fluctuation rather than a long term trend that needs to be corrected.
And I don't think the author is saying that laying people off won't balance the financials for that year or that quarter but that the ripple effects from a layoff can actually do more harm than the calculated returns.
- snap back attrition - loss of knowledge - opportunity cost - lost productivity from demoralized workforce
Nintendo is a great example of a company that when confronted with economic hardship due to bad strategy avoided layoff and instead reduced executive compensation.
https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/5/4496512/why-nintendos-sator...
Satoru Iwata effectively stated the same conclusions this article did that such moves might resolve short-term difficulties, but always proved counter-productive in the long-term. Long term thinking versus short term thinking not surprising for a company that has been around since 1889 and has evolved constantly.
It's almost like maybe investor sentiment and stock price is not a good metric for actually running a successful business. Just look at Apple this morning...
Revenue: $117.1 billion versus $121.1 billion expected
Investors are pulling their hair out because Apple only made $117 billion. Is anyone really going to miss that $4 billion? You'll hear investors and talking heads calling for corrective layoffs when in reality nothing needs to be done. They are still ridiculously profitable and will continue to be.
I feel like this is hitting on something that hasn't been given enough attention: what happens when a company doesn't meet Wall St. "predictions". The consensus view (at least in the mainstream media) appears to be that this means that the company has "under-performed" and thus should be punished. But... why? Maybe the Wall St analysts were the ones not performing well enough? Where is the accountability in the other direction?
Yes, the people who own the company will, i.e. shareholders. The majority are not some cartoonish greedy fatcats either; they're ordinary people like you and I who have retirement investments in stocks and mutual funds.
Moreover, if you think employees at FAANGs and big tech companies aren't on-board with this laser focus on share price, remember that a big, big chunk of their compensation is in equity, whether options, stock grants, employee stock purchase programs, etc. During the boom times, plenty of people in the software industry kept a live stock ticker feed on their desktops to keep track of how filthy rich they were getting and it was a frequent topic of casual conversation.
> The downsized companies, however, were outperformed consistently by the nondownsized ones during the initial two years following the downsizing.
Can you think of any confounding factors in this analysis? How do you control for important factors like, say: whether the board is in enough financial trouble to downsize?
How does that follow? The conclusion would be that both the companies and workers suffered unnecessarily for 2 years, with no long-term benefit afterward to the layoffs. In other words, you should just ride out the downtimes instead of panicking.
This is somewhat counter-intuitive to me so I suspect there are other confounders (overhiring, measuring financial performance in a complicated way, etc.) but I haven't had time to run the analysis for myself yet. Maybe the data is too sparse to support a more sophisticated model.
If someone else would like to give it a shot, it looks like these people have compiled the data in a convenient format, for at least the past two years: https://fueled.com/blog/2022-fortune-1000-companies-spreadsh...
I'd love to see this controlled for shareholder dividends and stock buybacks. A big trend we're seeing in this round of layoffs is companies doing a lot of service for their shareholders, some posting record profits, and sacking fractions of their workforce. It doesn't tell a story of sacrifices made due to financial trouble, it looks like nothing but ruthless profiteering and class warfare.
You're correct, obviously, on the general correlation aspect of companies having financial trouble and having to do layoffs.
The thing with many of these tech layoffs though, is these are in some cases companies with no trouble whatsoever. Companies with so many billions in the bank that they could continue to pay all salaries to everyone for a century without breaking a sweat. So they have zero need to reduce expenses.
Imagine that instead of a dog, it's an adult who makes their own choices and gets paid money, and who signed a contract where the terms of employment were spelled out very clearly..
I was with you until that part. Do people exist who can imagine that?
For some of the people in these layoffs it will be accurate to say they could have made different choices, and for others it won’t be.
Companies respond to consequences.
At a lower average compensation rate too, most likely. These companies are basically refinancing their labor force using cruelty and fear. It is working because they're all doing it, because we let them. System working as intended.
highly doubt it. The labor force is shrinking. There's already a dearth of talented software devs. And then there will be huge upward pressure on wages from lower level jobs that now have to pay 20$ an hour to get workers.
It's not exactly true. It actually takes quite a long time to hire competent employees, particularly more senior ones. Hence why it was so hard to hire in 2020-2021.
If the demand for brain surgeons doubled overnight, no amount of wage hike is going to magically double the supply of brain surgeons.
Consider the extreme counter-example: A small village of a dozen individuals sitting a top a mountain of gold is unlikely to be able to operate an industrial scale gold mining operation.
There can be too few people to do certain work. Nuclear plant operators. Ordinance disposal experts. Electricians in my area...
The responses to this post, of "we're adults that accepted an at-will employment contract" are correct. But if we all had that attitude, and if execs could treat staff like responsible adults rather than potential saboteurs, perhaps a more targeted, less disruptive and ultimately smaller layoff could be arranged.
(updated for typos)
Once a company grows beyond a certain threshold of employees, then the probability of having hired saboteurs increases.
This is where social safety nets could play an important role in incentivizing folks to not worry, thus reducing the likelihood that they attempt to sabotage a company on their way out.
But is the layoff really the first time having these employees was dangerous? If you can't trust your staff (and sometimes you can't) then don't you need policies even in good times that prevent them from doing dangerous stuff solo? E.g. the number of people who can drop your production users table should be tiny, merges to the main branch require a review+approval from someone other than the author, viewing PII data is logged etc etc.
> This is where social safety nets could play an important role in incentivizing folks to not worry, thus reducing the likelihood that they attempt to sabotage a company on their way out.
I don't think the social safety net is sufficient incentive. I think the components that create alignment are:
- severance is equiv to multiple months of _total_ compensation, such that people who are let go have a good shot at ending up ahead financially by getting a new job faster than that. For this reason, they're not necessarily even that upset.
- all employees, whether departing or retained should be _given_ some additional chunk of equity, possibly with some restriction which prevents them from selling for k months? Extending the exercise window is not enough, if some people have options which are underwater for that full period. Everyone then still has a material reason to want the company to do well. Retained employees who are likely asked to do more work do not feel that the departing employees got a better deal.
That Google, the king of data driven, is flagrantly incompetent on this front is pretty funny, though.
That being said, I got laid off this summer (US style no more need for your services, all access revoked) and it absolutely sucked.
Additionally, there's a lot of really pissed off Big Tech employees, and it's gonna be interesting to see what happens as a result of these (almost entirely unnecessary) layoffs.
Think the manager who does nothing, but is a smooth/shit talker, hence is very let go. Does and contributes nothing except for the moments they have to.
Should only be a handful of quarters - if you don’t count time for retrospectives and writing packets about how complicated and impressive the process was ;)
So what of the conditioning of employees by telling them: 'We're all a family', 'Sticking together in the long term!' and 'Everyone wins, yay!'. I don't think 'families' do abrupt layoffs en mass to their own in the morning.
The era of cruising on cheap money is over. It is time to learn to adapt with AI.
The capital owners want the working class to fight amongst themselves because it allows them to continue enriching themselves off the backs of the working class.
Even if you own some stocks or have a 401k, if you depend on a salary to pay your bills then you are a worker
In the UK working people, especially those earning above minimum wage, are taxed far more than the capitalists of the world like Tommy who can structure his income to pay just 30% marginal taxes rather than 60% plus.
You should never, ever consider your employer to be your family. The employer is not your friend, nor a relative. They are your employer.
I really dislike the whole "let's build the team spirit and be a great family together" approach. It's dishonest, and often done with the (explicit or implicit) intention of brainwashing.
Also, this goes both ways: I was an employer for the majority of my professional life. I had the best intentions and tried to be "good" and a friend to my employees, only to get screwed over many times in various ways by people later on. I learned that a professional relationship is different from a family relationship, and while you should try to be fair, you should never confuse the two.
I will add that their interests are often in conflict with the interests of the employees, and as such, in those matters the employer is best viewed as an adversary.
Can you give some examples, ie how did you do things before getting screwed and what have you changed after?
What are your top lessons you learned?
More generally, I learned to treat the relationship as a professional one. I strive to be fair and play by the book, but no longer have any expectations of people acting "fairly" or "nicely" towards their employer. Similarly, I don't think anybody should expect their employer to be their family — business decisions are made differently from family decisions.
I should probably also mention that my disillusionment led me to starting a bootstrapped business where I have no investors and no employees, so that I don't have to depend on anyone.
All this doesn't mean that we all have to be mean or evil to each other. Everything can still be fair. But an employee should not expect a company to be "good to them", nor should a company expect an employee to be "good to them". There are business boundaries to how far "good" can go on the company side, and on the employee side there are people who err on the side of treating a company like family (wrong) and who treat the company as the devil incarnate (wrong too).
There's a lot of people at these companies who don't do anything meaningful and are getting paid a boat load. There's people like that in almost every company.
Back from the Yahoo peak days I had multiple people tell me that all they did in a week was fix 1-2 small bugs in a day and didn't do jack shit the rest of the week and got paid handsomely. Probably explains in-part the demise of Yahoo as a tech company.
My point is, layoffs typically target workers who are not needed by the company anymore.
People do layoffs in their personal life too. Your house cleaner or landscaper gets laid off when you decide to stop using their services as you try to do the work yourself and save some money.
This ultra-left stance on layoffs being bad is ridiculous. It's part of the business cycle and economic outlook the companies are facing.
I had 7 layers of management between myself (IC) and the CEO at my last job with just a couple thousand people. How much of a “multiplier effect” can those people truly have? What ended up happening was feature creep ran too large, the company scrambled to hire engineers to keep up with pace of development, then the debt caught up with them once interest rates blew up.
Honestly, layers between ICs and CEOs should be logarithmic. 0 layers for 10 employees, 1 layer for 100, 2 layers for 1000, etc. IMO the “multiplier effect” ends with line managers
For example:
>Apple Computer Inc. said late Friday it was slashing its work force by 4,100 in a last-ditch effort to save the troubled computer maker.
> Out of the total number affected, about 2,700 are full-time workers. The remainder are part-time and contract employees. The cuts will affect about 30 percent of Apple's work force. Fifty-five percent of the job cuts will be in the United States.
(Source: https://money.cnn.com/1997/03/14/technology/apple/)
This is from 1997 in the pre-Steve Jobs era when Gil Amelio was CEO.
You can call it what you want, but if that action didn't occur at that time, Apple as we know today may not have existed.
I am picking Apple as a deliberate example because they are the the only big-tech company that hasn't announced a large scale layoff (yet). So, many people may be quick to jump to point out, "Look Ma! No layoffs at Apple".
For a large corporation, business cycles are a reality and layoffs become part of the tactic. It is very unpleasant for the people involved. But, that doesn't mean it doesn't work (in the long run).
They are mostly just purging after their irrational pandemic hiring as well as doing galaxy-brained copycat layoffs. Isn’t it remarkable that “economic conditions” lead dozens of companies to need to cut the same 5-7% of staff?
Labor cost is the major cost driver for big-tech. They just decided to axe that because that is the quickest way for them to impact costs and conserve cash when revenues are expected to drop, stay flat, or at best grow very slowly.
At best, they are right in their economic activity projection, it slows their revenue and profit growth (they will still be profitable). At worst, they are wrong about it and the revenue and profit growth is not slowed (a good problem for them to have) and they can just resume hiring.
Regarding your comment on companies not necessarily having their back against the wall -- unfortunately, this is behavior is quite common. Companies don't have to be bleeding in their P&L to take layoff decisions.
First, the intro with the dog analogy. If you remotely see your relationship with your employer as you being the beloved family dog, you're the problem.
Second, the author quotes a paper on downsizing in a journal and afterwards says, "[i]n all my searching I wasn't able to find any hard data which suggests layoffs either enable a company to better compete or improve earnings in the long term." However the conclusion of the very paper he references says, "[t]he findings of this field study indicate that downsizing can improve an organization's financial performance but not in the near-term.... [R]esearch strongly suggests that it likely will take three or more years for organizations to be able to truly see the financial benefits of downsizing." If you look at all the graphs in the Results section of the paper, it shows that companies who downsize started out being weaker performers than those who weren't downsizing, but a few years after downsizing they were largely able to close that underperformance gap.
Within corporate decision-making, this rate is actually "fucking genius" level. This article doesn't say what it thinks it says.
An alternative metaphor is this: imagine you got a dog, raised him, lost your sources of income and couldn’t afford to feed him. You kept him anyway out of pride or loyalty or whatever, and watched as he withered away without adequate resources to make him thrive. At the same time, others were looking for dogs and were fully willing to feed them and support them.
When companies don’t do thoughtful adjustments like layoffs, they end up instead in a cycle of slow withering, where the best resources leave and aren’t replaced, and the quality of the workforce slowly decays.
Layoffs may not be “fun” but they’re a necessary part of operating a successful company… and much better than the alternative.
During the pandemic lots of ppl got pets… acting on impulse. Now they realise a pet is a lot of work and it’s not for them.
With more automation and unstable world economy we will probably see more layoffs. Entire industries may go extinct.
Yes I am on more pessimistic side, but the last decade was great for software engineers and as the Bible says after 7 good years there may be 7 bad years coming.
I do think its somewhat unreasonable to be in a position where you do similar work year after year though (similar to e.g. what doctors or lawyers do) and expect to keep getting the same income. That's the deal with Software (or really, any creative field): you get paid really well but you can't stagnate.
Now they are getting old and there is no short of people to work on tech so the cycle restarts.
Honestly if I do get in a company that practices this I will quit. It has done horrors to people close to me and they will never recover.
It seems that nowadays software companies mostly work on modularized toy problems that new grads can solve effectively.
If you go to the chemical industry that is not the case. Layoffs in senior personnel will bite you within months.
One example: I was talking to someone at a social event and they was complaining that her company had laid off so many people they was doing the work of 3.
They then went on to say that they was running two fantasy football leagues.
I asked them what kind of computer they had at home and they looked at me confused and said "oh no, I don't have a computer at home. If I did then they would expect me to work some there too"
From that I realize that they (singular) was doing the work of three people and running two fantasy football leagues in their eight hour work day.
This may be exceptional, but with all the talk of quiet quitting, and all the other observations of people not working at work, I don't think it's all that rare.
What do you read into a company that starts doing large scale layoffs even though it has a massive hoard of cash and remains massively profitable, just because some temporary trouble hits?
Given the company can easily retain the staff from a financial perspective, and employee churn is incredibly expensive - it has to mean they really, truly they can't think of anything useful to do with those staff. From that you would have to conclude that management and the board are simply out of ideas for how to grow the business.
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-01-30...
Dogs don't choose their owners. Dogs can't leave their owners and find another one if they don't like the current one. Dogs can't educate themselves on which owners are more or less likely to value their skills, and aren't over-adopting dogs because it's the trend to do so in 2021, even though they're obviously not going to want to keep all these dogs around once their absurd growth rate slows down.
The layoffs suck and I hope the people affected land on their feet, but this dog analogy is nonsense.
I get the point, but we are in the 21st Century. Very few people stay a Company (assuming stats are true) as they did before the 1990's.
In this case, the dog would have expected to stay in that home forever, where people in a company would probably move on after a few years.
Hopefully the payoff for Apple is significant and obvious so that at least some learn the lesson in the article.
In fact, it's probably impossible.
On the other hand, everyone knows who the deadwood is on their team.
> Cruel
I know multiple instances of coworkers getting laid off, and being very angry about it. But a year later, they'd ruefully admit the company was right to lay them off, and they had been pushed off-center and decided to do what they really wanted to do - like start a business. More than one was laid off for coming to work high, and as a result got clean. They were, after a year or two, all better off and happier than before they were laid off.
I used to have a dog.
When I had to get rid of her I ended up in the VA mental health ward for ten days because I tried to shoot myself in the head, not completely because of the dog (becoming homeless helped a lot) but I’m pretty sure it was a significant contribution.
To top it off if you take “a dog” to the pound it’s free but if you take “your dog” down there it costs $80 so the poor little thing lost her name because I didn’t have $80 so she was “this dog wandering around the neighborhood I found”.
One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do was get rid of that dog and I’ve done some pretty hard things in my life.
Tell me more about your coworkers being out of work for a couple months before finding that next job.
Here is why. Just because someone is at-will doesnt mean the manager has the power to fire someone without any repercussions. Management can be a political house of cards and "layoffs" is a safe blanket to wipe these people out.
case 1: Another deadweight case is to rip through the relational bias. Fred is a very nice guy and he does an OK job, but could the market provide someone else cheaper and/or better than fred? since hes not excelling lets roll the dice and find out. Fred wouldnt normally get let go because hes doing just the bare minimum to get by and there is no case for such a thing.
case 2: manager is incompetent(say it aint so!) and is hiring the wrong people. What a mess! how do you deal with that?! Time to clean up the whole department and start fresh.
The obvious downside of layoffs is that all too often, talented, loyal, and undeserving people get caught up in the mix, but at least management "feels terrible about it"
So, the more straightforward way is to realize that one has been fucked over. At first it doesn't matter who's responsible for that, just the fact that one feels that it happened, and that it feels like shit. Talking to people about that helps. It someone is worth their salt, they'll tell that this has always been the case - the one that cares about a person the most, and especially the one that can do the most, is the person themselves. And another important realization is that most of the time, this doesn't happen because of specific cruelty - most of the time, it's ignorance. The other party didn't care to consider the impact of their act, and that is normal. There's not enough energy to care about all. And even if we care, sometimes things must be done. Or we need to take part, even if we know the impact and don't want that.
I do believe that this all doesn't need to make one jaded and cynical all the time, about life and people. In fact I believe the opposite: that one needs to find a way to love all this, in spite of all of these things working in such a way. After all, to love, one needs to know. Because if one doesn't know, they don't know what they love in the first place.
I'm guessing letting an individual go carries higher risk of a wrongful termination suit than a bulk layoff, so there is still an incentive to mask performance-based decisions with economic justifications.
Layoffs should be an opportunity to embrace and accept the Peter Principle and lower a series of people down a rung until you layoff the least valuable person.
Of course that only works if managers/directors/seniors/whatever can do the job immediately below them. I think they should but many places think “a manager is a manager and can manage any kind of team” which I think is bunk.
1) It is generally accepted that the best people leave first in this kind of layoff. But 3 years later, the corporation is doing as well as the others. Hence, removing the best people does no damage to a bigcorp.
2) A post in this thread describes how regular aggressive layoffs turn the culture toxic, setting people against each other. But one common response in nature is cooperation: people form a clique, and exclude colleagues who could damage them. They make nonmembers perform badly by e.g. witholding information. This sers outsiders up for being laid off. An evolutionary pressure selects for people having the political prowess to survive layoffs, and against good performers which endanger the status quo.
So a bigco's level of performance does not depend on having good workers. Instead, all this points to the work performed by the worst workers to be the major determinating factor for success.
It depends on what goals you have.
Sometimes products, services, teams and organizations are not aligned with the business strategy, and have to be restructured.
Sometimes there are locations with a high cost of life, but the value generated at those locations are not proportionally higher.
Sometimes you have outliers in the compensation distribution that no longer meet productivity expectations. Some individuals make key contributions and then stop making them while enjoying the same benefits.
And sometimes you have pseudoscience like "Vitality curve" style layoffs which are proven to make things worse.
a) Companies may be formed, operated, and controlled by people, but they are complex systems that do not have feelings and do not care about individuals no matter how much the culture warriors say otherwise. They are systems designed to survive, with or without you.
b) We are not defined by our jobs
I'm not making a case one way or another for capitalism, or layoffs, or the meaning of life, rather pointing out that this is the reality in which we live and once you realize these two points, things will make more sense.
I implore these corporations: Please stop hiring so many people if you can’t guarantee lifetime employment!
Surely there's much worse to come? Look at how much compensation came down in investment banks since the 00s. It's not conceivable that these large firms require tens of thousands of geniuses to function.
But in the absence of layoffs perhaps those companies would have done worse. Therefore we could easily argue that this does not contradict the claim that layoffs do work. In particular layoffs are not meant to make a company grow faster than other companies, they are meant to prevent extreme bloat and inefficiency and get back to a normal baseline. So if we assume that context the data makes more sense.
It is really hard to say if they work or not since there is no consistent reason why they are done and picking some external measure doesn't prove much.
I think this misses a piece of logic. A reason companies downsize because their growth plans didn't come through. Like at the moment where tech companies scaled up for the pandemic imagining growth would continue at that rate.
So now we are saying that companies that made a sound strategic plan perform better than companies that had to rip their plan up and start again. Layoffs are the effect, not the cause.
It is childish to say that layoffs don't work. When a company runs out of cash it dies. Losing staff is hard, but if you can't afford them you can't afford them. Most managers hate layoffs too, even a psychopathic manager would see it as a failure.
So whilst layoffs may set back your plan, at least the company survives.
For clarity, there is no excuse for being shitty to staff during layoffs. US labour laws seem particularly weak in this area.
the cruelty is the point.
eta: if the economy at large is adding 500,000 jobs as reported today this makes the laying off companies look either foolish or somehow specially in a downturn.
